Global Governance

Today it is argued that there are
global problems such as war, terrorism, climate change, world hunger, inequalities of
condition, diseases such as HIV/AIDS and human rights violations that are beyond the
capacity of nation-states to ‘solve’. Therefore, some form of transnational
political authority above and beyond nation-states (including democratic ones) is
required to address these problems. This is proposed as a desirable alternative to
American global leadership.

The philosophical basis for
global governanceFrom the premise that all
individuals on the planet possess human rights it is taken to follow that international
law is the paramount authority that determines those rights, while international
agreements establish and expand new rights and norms. In this view, new transnational
political institutions (e.g., the International Criminal Court or a strengthened UN) are
required to monitor, adjudicate, cajole and administer the international agreements and
laws in varying degrees. International non-governmental organizations (INGOs or NGOs) are
said to represent “global civil society”, or the “peoples” of the
planet. These NGOs would work with transnational institutions and participate in
international conferences helping develop the new norms for global governance.Who governs?To whom is political authority
responsible? How are rulers chosen? How are rulers replaced? How is the power of rulers
limited? How are laws made? How can bad laws be changed? These are the oldest questions
of politics going back to Plato and Aristotle. These great questions of politics are
answered in liberal democracy. Political authority resides in a self-constituted people.
This self-governing people choose their own rulers through elections and can replace them
if they are unresponsive. The people limit the power of rulers through a constitution
that functions as a basic law. Bad laws can be changed by elected national legislatures.
In practice, democracy occurs only within the borders of individual liberal democratic
nation-states. As Marc Plattner, co-editor of the National Endowment for
Democracy’s Journal of Democracy writes, “…we cannot enjoy
liberal democracy outside the framework of the nation-state.”

Global governance and
transnational authority are undemocraticAlthough there is much talk of
“democratic values”, global governance and transnationalism can provide no
straightforward answers to the most important questions of democracy. The elites (the
international lawyers, judges, activists, NGOs, and UN officials) who participate in the
global governance system are not accountable to any self-governing “people.”
How can these rulers be replaced? How can “the governed” repeal bad laws and
regulations that their “governors” have imposed upon them? Global governance
provides no democratic answers to these questions.

Human rights and international
law are always “evolving” in a way determined by elitesAlthough human rights and
international law are considered the moral basis for global governance, they are not
“timeless truths” readily understood and agreed to by most people. Instead
these concepts are constantly changing or “evolving.” Human rights and
international law are, at any given moment, what transnational elites (international
lawyers, UN bureaucrats) tell us they are. What was considerd an absolute human right in
1998 differs from what is considered an absolute human right in 2008, which, in turn,
will be different from absolute human rights in 2018. For, today a UN convention
maintains that children have an “absolute human right” to conduct any
correspondence with anyone in the world without interference from their parents, which,
strictly interpreted, would give pedophiles the “international human right”
to communicate with children on the Internet. It is doubtful that most people in the
world would agree.

NGOs are not a substitute for
elected democratic institutionsNGOs participate in the writing of
global treaties alongside democratic and non-democratic governments, but they are
essentially pressure groups, elected by no one and responsible only to themselves, not to
any democratic people. They do not represent the “peoples of the
world.”

Can sovereignty or democratic
self-government be “shared” or “pooled” in a transnational
authority?Sovereignty essentially means
self-government, a particular people makes its own political decisions.
Logically, it is not possible to “share” self-government - that is the
ability to rule yourselves - if you cede democratic authority to a political or judicial
body that is not responsible or accountable to your own citizens. For example, if ten
countries are “pooling sovereignty,” what happens when some nations disagree
with the joint decision of the others? If these nations go along with the joint decision
against the wishes of their own people, they are no longer sovereign because they no
longer rule themselves, but are, in effect, ruled by those outside of their democratic
system.

Global
governance/transnationalism will not be more effective at addressing global problems than
liberal democratic nation-states led by the United StatesWhen human rights were threatened in
the Balkans it was democratic nation-states led by the United States under the auspices
of NATO, not the UN or any transnational institutions that addressed and solved this
regional (and global) problem. NATO is an international organization not a transnational
organization. That is, it is an organization created and run by member sovereign
nation-states who agree to act together. It is not an institution that claims
transnational authority over democratic nations like the International Criminal
Court. Likewise serious global problems such as genocide in Darfur, HIV-AIDS, and
environmental concerns will only be effective if addressed at the international─
not the transnational level. That is to say by a serious international effort led by the
United States and other nation-states rather than by ceding sovereign authority to some
transnational body or to the United Nations. Thus global governance is both undemocratic
and ineffective.

Why has the United States not joined the International Criminal Court?The US has principled (as well as
practical objections) to the ICC. On principle the United States notes that under ICC
rules the soldiers of a liberal democracy whose nation did not ratify the ICC treaty
could nevertheless be tried by ICC judges against the will of that democratic state. For
example, India and the Czech Republic are democracies that have not ratified the ICC. If
Indian or Czech troops serving in peacekeeping missions in the Congo (which did ratify
the ICC) are accused of human rights violations, they could be tried before this
transnational court by the determination of ICC’s Pre-Trial chamber, not the
judiciary of the democratic state itself. Thus, the ICC rules are in direct contradiction
to the values of democratic self-government. Besides the United States, other democracies
that have not ratified the ICC include India, Israel, Chile, the Czech Republic and
Taiwan.